At 6:00 a.m. on March 18, local time, the morning sun was rising in Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia. Chen Xiaowen just finished breakfast and prepared for a busy day of work. Like many local citizens, he takes public transport to get from home to his office.

Chen Xiaowen, a manager at Hisense Network Technology company, has been traveling from China to Addis Ababa for nearly three months. Addis Ababa is one of Africa's largest cities, and buses are the most important way to get around. However, due to large passenger flow, low coverage rate, long departure interval and inaccurate control, it is "common" to wait for half an hour at the bus station during peak hours. The local public transport is in urgent need of an intelligent upgrade, which is why Chen has travelled so far.

On December 29, 2021, Chen xiaowen arrived in Addis Ababa after a 12-hour flight as thousands of families prepared for the New Year with lanterns and decorations. Along with him, in addition to his luggage, he also has the smart transportation construction technology and experience from China's Hisense.

On March 14, Hisense officially signed a contract with the Addis Ababa municipal government for the smart bus construction project. Chen Xiaowen is the project manager of the project. From the moment of landing, his team will stay in Ethiopia for two years to help Addis Ababa build a new model of modern intelligent bus management, effectively improve local citizens' bus experience, and create a new model of international cooperation in the field of "Belt and Road" intelligent transportation.

Ethiopia is a belt and Road initiative country and a pilot country in China-Africa industrial capacity cooperation. In recent years, with the deepening of belt and Road cooperation, more and more Chinese manufacturing and technologies, from railways and automobiles to smart phones and intelligent transportation, have been deployed in Africa, bringing tangible benefits to the local people.

Hisense's bid to win the Addis Ababa Smart Bus project in Ethiopia is of great significance to China's smart transportation industry, said Guan Jizhen, vice president of the China Intelligent Transportation Association. On the one hand, this project is a project financed by the World Bank and operated in accordance with international rules. The Chinese enterprise can win the bid, which shows that Chinese enterprises have the ability to compete with international enterprises in the overseas intelligent transportation market. On the other hand, it shows that China's technical standards are beginning to move systematically to overseas markets, which is an important beginning.

"This is the inevitable result of the development of Chinese enterprises' technological strength and execution capability." In hisense international operations chief designer yong-lei wang, it seems, China's domestic motor vehicles, non-motor vehicles human of motorised traffic conditions and the complexity of the scene is rare in the world, these scenes "out" for Chinese enterprises in technology, products, services, competitiveness, temper the Chinese enterprise under the complex scene design and the adaptation of systemic project and its unique ability to perform in place of landing.

Wang Yonglei is truly proud of this: "At present, China's intelligent transportation enterprises have the ability to respond quickly to the development of big data and ARTIFICIAL intelligence technology, and can find problems driven by data and solve problems driven by AI. Compared with foreign companies, Chinese companies are already ahead in many aspects."

"Despite civil wars in Ethiopia in recent years, infrastructure is improving, especially in Addis Ababa, but there is still a lot of room for improvement due to the lack of advanced management models and intelligent technologies." Chen Xiaowen to the international Business Daily reporter feeling, "in Ethiopia, I feel the actual traffic conditions while thinking about the plan in mind, deeply feel their heavy responsibility, determined to make this project a model project."

As the first order of Hisense intelligent transportation "going to sea", Hisense has no mature experience to refer to, and Chen Xiaowen is faced with a blank sheet of paper and a "hard bone", while the outbreak of COVID-19 has virtually increased the difficulty of promoting the project.

"The hardest part is not the language or the geographical distance, but the differences in needs caused by cultural differences." Chen Xiaowen said, because intelligent transportation has strong national conditions and regional characteristics, different countries and different cities face different problems, to solve the problem has to go deep into the local. In order to get a thorough understanding of the local traffic situation, he led his team to explore the streets of buses, stations, stations and so on many times in the interval of work, and kept communicating and negotiating with the domestic team to improve the implementation of the project. Finally, on March 15, the establishment of the local branch was completed.

Now, Chen xiaowen's team has initially worked out a smart bus implementation plan suitable for Ethiopia's national conditions, and the project has entered the implementation stage. He wants to use technology to "fill in" the time, with two years of efforts to span the development of 20 years, and make contributions to the development of the local intelligent transportation industry.